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Last Exit to Brooklyn (Evergreen Book) Paperback – January 13, 1994
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateJanuary 13, 1994
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-109780802131379
- ISBN-13978-0802131379
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Editorial Reviews
Review
As dramatic and immediate as the click of a switchblade knife.”Los Angeles Times
The raw strength and concentrated power of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities.”Harry T. Moore
Last Exit to Brooklynshould explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.”Allen Ginsberg
Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different personslightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said.”The Nation
Selby has an unerring instinct for honing our collapse into novels as glittering and as cutting as pure, block, jagged glass.”Saturday Review
Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing.”Newsweek
The marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose.” Richard Price, from his My Five Most Essential Books,” published in Newsweek (April 13, 2009)
From the Inside Flap
"An extraordinary achievement,...a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside."--The New York Times Book Review
"As dramatic and immediate as the click of a switchblade knife."--Los Angeles Times
"The raw strength and concentrated power of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities."--Harry T. Moore
"Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."--Allen Ginsberg
"Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different person-slightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said."--The Nation
"Selby has an unerring instinct for honing our collapse into novels as glittering and as cutting as pure, black, jagged glass."--Saturday Review
"Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing."--Newsweek
Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1928. Last Exit to Brooklyn, his first novel, was originally published in 1964. He has since written five other novels, The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, and The Willow Tree, and a collection of short stories, Song of the Silent Snow. Mr. Selby lives in Los Angeles.
Product details
- ASIN : 0802131379
- Publisher : Grove Press (January 13, 1994)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780802131379
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802131379
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #288,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #383 in City Life Fiction (Books)
- #2,791 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #15,839 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Irvine Welsh is the author of Trainspotting, Ecstasy, Glue, Porno, Filth, Marabou Stork Nightmares, The Acid House, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and Reheated Cabbage. He divides his time between Florida, Ireland, and Scotland.
Hubert Selby Jr. (1928–2004), was a celebrated author of nine novels, including the classic bestseller Last Exit to Brooklyn. His other novels include Requiem for a Dream, The Room, and The Demon. Selby’s fiction, which was championed by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was noted for its gritty portrayal of addiction and urban despair, and has influenced generations of authors, artists, and musicians. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Selby died in Los Angeles in 2004.
Hubert Selby Jr. (1928–2004), was a celebrated author of nine novels, including the classic bestseller Last Exit to Brooklyn. His other novels include Requiem for a Dream, The Room, and The Demon. Selby’s fiction, which was championed by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was noted for its gritty portrayal of addiction and urban despair, and has influenced generations of authors, artists, and musicians. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Selby died in Los Angeles in 2004.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Last Exit to Brooklyn is not an easy read, and I wouldn’t recommend it to the average reader looking for an escape of some sort. But if you’re looking for savage honesty coupled with prose not unlike the music of jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, Selby is your man.
The rather eccentric text notwithstanding, I think that Mr. Selby does very good work in illustrating the kind of people who inhabit what Maxim Gorky more than a century ago called "the lower depths", and-unlike most other writers and dramatists discussing this-does NOT fall into the trap either of 'bad genes" or bad environment" as superficial attempts at "explanation". He simply relies on the narrative to tell the story of what happens to people who choose their lives bereft of any commitment to reason, good judgment, or even ordinary decency, and (still worse) what happens to their children...
There is little or no romanticizing poverty (or its purported "helpers") and this too is a strength of the book, and its author.
This may well have the status of a modern classic! As a work of literature, it certainly has not outgrown its relevance or importance. It is at least as applicable to many millions of people today as it was when it was first released a half century or so ago. The fact that no attempt at "solution" or "correction" to their self-inflicted and self-imposed degradation anywhere in his book is an additional point in its favor, understanding that sometimes evil is beyond remediation or cure.
All told, it is an engaging read, a well written novel (or collection of short stories) and a book that I am glad to have read-even though the avoidance of the usual "happy ending", the book-and even each of the short stories-ends the squalid ways they begin-might dismay many readers.
The structure is in three parts, but the central one, the longest, "Strike", might stand alone. Harry Black, the protagonist, discoverer of accidental love and its uncontrollable forces, immediately takes his place among the most unforgettable characters of America fiction: Queequeg (Moby Dick), Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), Jim Casey (The Grapes of Wrath), Blanche DuBois, (A Streetcar Named Desire), Jack Burden (All the King's Men), Joe Buck (Midnight Cowboy), The Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Night of the Iguana), Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter), Ethan Fromm, Billy Budd, and the others in our pantheon.
Hubert Selby, Jr. ran away from home to the Merchant Marne as a teenager and never graduated from high school. Yet, out of sheer naivety and, "I needed money so I thought I'd try to write," he produced one of the greatest masterpieces of mid-twentieth century American literature. His gift is an unflinching verisimilitude of things hidden yet true.
If you have never read it, or even heard of it, that's understandable due to it's controversial nature which continues to this day. It's not easy to shock in 2019, but this book, from 1953, still does, as much by it's characters and it's situations as by its startlingly transparent technique of eliminating quotation marks, and other indications of speech, yet managing to convey voices and situations as clearly as any radio play. The incessant dialogue of multiple speakers rings clear, entirely by tone, by Selby's flawless ear.
Is this novel a unique and personal keening for the human condition, for our endless universal tale of love and loss, or is it a rank exploitation of human squalor and agony, a terrifying vision of hopelessness and hell?
Top reviews from other countries
The book is disturbing in its violence yet Selby's eyes are like an Argus, peering into the alleys of life in The Projects and in the Brooklyn docks - bringing to light the tragic lives of the queers and the fairies , the alcoholics, the perverts and the working classes and the dysfunctional families of the time.
A gut-wrenching novel that spares nothing to expose the darkest secrets and desires of society.